For most of recorded history work has been the price of survival. But the terms of that bargain such as who works for whom, and on what conditions, have changed radically and sometimes violently throughout recorded history. If yesterday’s economy chained people to land via feudalism, and later to owners via slavery, today’s economy increasingly binds livelihoods to platforms, data, and algorithms.

With that we are also seeing business models trying to shift human consumption from ownership to subscription. The next frontier is already in progress with automation and the push towards AGI. Capitalism’s continuous push for lower costs and higher profits now threatens to rip income and meaning from work altogether. The question for the generations alive today is whether we together can thoughtfully design a transition or let dignity, agency, and broad prosperity become historical footnotes. If we leave this decision up to big tech and the oligarchs we know what they’ll choose. One of our species biggest problems is the inability to learn from the past so we don’t repeat it. Let’s take a quick walk down memory lane for a refresher.

I. Feudalism

Feudalism in Medieval Europe organized production through obligation. Serfs were “unfree” peasants tied to an estate where they owed labor, rents, and loyalty to a lord in exchange for protection and access to land. There was no labor market in any modern sense. No competitive wages with little mobility, and scant recourse against abuse. Human dignity was prescribed by birth not individual capability and social status determined the boundaries of a life. Even when feudalism frayed through plague and peasant revolts its logic persisted - owners come first, survival second, choice last.

II. Slavery

While feudalism tied people to land, slavery turned people themselves into capital. As sad as it is, only 75 years ago we still had segregated schools* and 175 years ago we still treated humans as property**, as a means to produce goods and services. That may seem like an extremely distant past but for the oldest alive today they may have only been removed from those situations by just a few generations. It was not merely an immoral labor system, slavery is an unethical stain on humanity’s past. In the mind of a capitalist though, it maximized output by annihilating humanity. It is undeniable that the United States was built with enslaved Africans and their descendants who were treated as assets to be bought, sold, collateralized, and brutally exploited for plantation profits. The lasting effects of slavery like legal apartheid, racialized labor markets, and racial wealth gaps survive long after the technical abolishment of slavery. We still have far to travel but as MLK Jr. once pronounced "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice," a powerful reminder that while progress towards fairness takes time, it ultimately moves in that direction, often by means of human effort. [*1954 Brown vs. Board of Education][**1865 - 13th amendment abolished slavery]

III. Wage Work

The Industrial Revolution was indeed a turning point for the world. Capitalism replaced status and bondage to labor with an open contract and wage, unlocking extraordinary growth. Workers could in principle, sell their labor to the highest bidder. But unfortunately the early factory floor reproduced feudal and slave logics in milder form - long hours, child labor, dangerous conditions, and housing tied to employers. Dignity advanced only when counterweights such as unions, public education, safety laws, and social pressure made work contracts something more than “your money or your life.”

Think of the 1920’s armed insurrection of coal miners, The Battle of Blair Mountain, where just over a 100 years ago there was no such thing as the weekend, or an 8 hour workday. Those were fought for and gained by workers. Basic respect and dignity must continually be protected and cherished otherwise capitalism will move back in the opposite direction in the name of greater and greater profits!

The **Battle of Blair Mountain** was the largest labor uprising in United States history and is the largest armed uprising since the American Civil War.[4][5] The conflict occurred in Logan County, West Virginia, as part of the Coal Wars, a series of early-20th-century labor disputes in Appalachia.
For five days from late August to early September 1921, some 10,000 armed coal miners confronted 3,000 lawmen and strikebreakers (called the Logan Defenders)[6] who were backed by coal mine operators during the miners's attempt to unionize the southwestern West Virginia coalfields when tensions rose between workers and mine management.

This progress for labor protection and rights along with the New Deal compromises and postwar social settlements in many countries created a new bargain: productivity gains would finance rising wages; ownership would be democratized through pensions and home equity; and a middle class would consume what it produced. Dignity became a mass possibility, but that new bargain didn’t last forever.

IV. Platforms and the Data Factory

Over the last forty years though, we’ve shifted into reverse again. Globalization, deregulation, mergers, and digitization created concentrated markets with monopoly corporate power. The move towards franchises, subcontractors, temp agencies, and gig platforms more recently displace responsibility down the chain. Workers became “independent contractors” in name, algorithmically managed employees in practice. Data, the exhaust of life and leisure turned into a hidden input that big tech collects and monetizes.

This stage preserves the appearance of free choice while often stripping workers of benefits, bargaining power, and predictable income. Dignity is reframed as the right to rate your delivery driver rather than your right to stability, voice, and a fair share. So we must awaken from our collective slumber and realize big tech and social media’s core business model turns people into the product. The platforms collect detailed behavioral data like what you click, hover over, pause on, re-watch, or even type and delete and bundle those signals into profiles sold to advertisers as “targeting.” Your attention becomes the inventory; your data becomes the ad buyer’s map. Data is enriched with third-party sources and machine-learned inferences like interests, mood, propensity to buy, enabling micro-targeted ads priced by how precisely you can be reached and nudged.

Your name. Your location. Your shopping habits. Your political leanings. Your health status. Your voice. Your face. Your keystrokes. Every day, corporations vacuum up terabytes of your personal data. Not to serve you better, but to sell you, shape you, and control your behavior.

To maximize that inventory, platforms constantly experiment to keep you online. They A/B test everything to favor content that spikes watch time, comments, or reshares. While they’re at it, they deploy enhancements like infinite scroll, auto-play, reward notifications, and streaks. These systems optimize for engagement over well-being, because outrage is reliably “sticky.” The result is a negative feedback loop: the more reactive the content, the more it’s promoted; the more it’s promoted, the more time you spend; the more time you spend, the richer the profile and the more valuable the ads. Note - this is why you won’t see any social media sites for the Dues campaign, I’m not going to play their game.

V. From Owning to Renting Life

Renting provides less autonomy in consumption as you temporarily have access to rather than own the tools. The result is higher lifetime costs and recurring dependence on corporate terms that can change without your knowledge or consent. For households already squeezed by less than steady incomes, living on subscriptions is like living on the edge of a treadmill. Maybe you have already seen some of this morphing across your day to day:

Subscriptions and “as-a-service” replace one-time purchases: software, media, razors, cars, even home appliances become monthly fees.
Locks and loaders: digital rights management and proprietary ecosystems make repair, resale, or switching costly. Think of propriety software, patented seeds, equipment that can only be repaired by the dealership.
Data tethering: products degrade or disappear without server-side authorization; your “purchase” depends on a company’s ongoing consent.

VI. What’s at Stake?

Basic human dignity requires more than survival - it requires agency and the ability to refuse bad deals, plan a future, care for family, and participate as an equal citizen. When society is driven by a negative impact algorithms or on-demand piecework, dignity in professional work and career begins to erode. The ability to afford goods and services. If automation lowers average costs but concentrates income, affordability becomes a math problem without a solution: cheap things, empty wallets. The economy can produce abundance while households live scarcity.

Civic and societal health. Work and careers in general have always been a social glue where people meet, collaborate, and build solidarity. The new reality that big tech and corporate America is pushing fragments this glue. Subscription life channels everything through a private gatekeeper. When fewer people feel economically secure, anger grows, and democratic attention migrates from long-term public goods to short-term survival.

VII. The Choice in Front of Us

We have traveled from lords and masters to contracts and code. Feudalism denied mobility; slavery denied humanity; the platform age risks denying agency. Automation and AI can either free us from drudgery or free capital from paying for labor. Subscriptions can either smooth access or sentence families to perpetual rent.

History’s lesson is not that progress is inevitable. It’s that progress is designed through rules that balance innovation with equity, and through institutions that insist prosperity be shared.

We still get to choose. In my opinion, this version of corrupt capitalism has run its course. Let’s move towards a better system that protects human dignity. We’ve done it before by moving away from systems like slavery and feudalism, we can do it again. A few suggestions:

1) Make income less hostage to a job. Universal basic services (healthcare, childcare, transit, broadband) cut the cash you need to live. Earnings insurance and portable benefits follow the person across gigs and employers.

2) Give workers power where they stand. Federal collective bargaining and wage boards set floors in industries where local organizing is hard.

3) Tax where the surplus lives. Modernize excess-profits and monopoly taxes; align global minimums to stop profit shifting. Treat buybacks and mega-distributions as signals to share gains with workers and the public that enabled them.

4) Restore real ownership for consumers. Enact right-to-repair and interoperability mandates; treat DRM abuses as unfair trade practices. Require offline functionality or escrowed keys for essential goods; if a service is discontinued, users get tools to unlock and migrate.

5) Aim automation at complementing people, not replacing them. Tie public procurement and tax credits to human-complementary adoption. AI that augments care workers, teachers, technicians paired with paid upskilling.

Capitalism from Slavery to Subscriptions